Since we’ve been doing weekly player challenges, some truly excellent players have come out of the woodwork and really gotten into it.
One of these dedicated players is Matthew from the Czech Republic, a.k.a. MadMadju, who takes challenges and competition very seriously — but also likes to mess around with games and find ways to break them.
Case in point, when we had our Escape! challenge, he found a hilarious glitch where he could get safely to the end of the game by getting on top of one of the killer robots and just surfing all the way to the exit:
“I discovered that all of the enemies have hitboxes,” he explains. “Then I found a shortcut which helped me get above the robots. I also realized that the robots were following me, so I decided to jump on its head. To get him to move, I walked forward a bit to make him think that I was further away and trick him into ‘following’ me.”
I wasn’t competing with anyone. I was just trying to beat my personal best score.
MadMadju
Matthew has been a competitive player all his life. “I’ve played games since I was 4, and I’ve been speedrunning since I started playing games,” he says. “I am a really competitive person, so when I play games where there’s a timer, I always want to finish the game as fast as I can. I used to play a lot of games with timers, like Jazz Jackrabbit 2. I wasn’t competing with anyone — I was just trying to beat my personal best score.”
Matthew only joined the CREY community this year at the recommendation of a friend, but he’s enjoying the challenges. His name is usually found in the top 5 leaderboard positions of every challenge, and he has taken home the $1,000 USD reward on several occasions.
“I love competing with others and trying to beat them,” he says, “and the $1,000 USD prizes makes it way more intense.”